Friday, February 01, 2008

the good news is that i have an all-new, all-different design that you might prefer! the bad news is that you might like the new design even less.

i'd been thinking of redesigning the blog for awhile, and decided to finally do so to coincide with the impending release of wack cylinders, my first solo album since 2004. believe it or not, wack cylinders will be my first release to feature databent album artwork, so to commemorate the event, the blog now features not one but five databent backgrounds!

the three major complaints i heard about the old design were

the animation was distracting

the white-on-black text was hard-to-read

some thought the color scheme was loud or ugly

as you can see, #1 is solved—there's no animation anywhere. #2 is also no longer an issue. as for #3...

the blog now has five different backgrounds. when you visit a page, one of them will load at random. if you don't like that one, you can select your favorite in the sidebar in the right column. if you despise all of them, i've given you two extra options—a dignified solid white or solid black background. (if your javascript is disabled, you'll just see the white background.) as time goes on, i'll probably remove old backgrounds and replace them with different ones to keep things fresh.

this new design is a big change in several ways; most notably it's a fixed-width design, so the text doesn't sprawl all the way across the page as it used to. this should make it a bit easier to read. however, it could make some older posts look a bit squished. also, if you have a puny screen size (800x600 or smaller), you might have to scroll a bit, and you definitely won't get to see much of the cool backgrounds. (the backgrounds are designed to look different at different screen sizes, but only start looking good at 1024x768 or larger.)

leave your comments, and especially your bug reports.

p.s.wack cylinders will probably be finished this month, and released no later than march. to hear some sample tracks, check my mp3 page, myspace, or last.fm.¶

I liked it better the other way. Sure, the animation was slightly distracting, but I didn't really mind it. The background now is wildly distracting to me and the jagged edges of the borders just makes me feel edgy and uncomfortable. I'll change it to plain white or something - I always thought you had a cool design before. :)

My biggest complaint has always been how little you send to your RSS feed. It's awful. I rarely know what you're really talking about just from the RSS post. Sometimes I don't click through if I can't figure it out... I've noticed that most blogger blogs are providing full feeds now. Have you considered doing that since you don't have advertising?

bil: i don't really use feeds so it hadn't even occurred to me that my feed didn't include the full posts. i've set it to "full" so once it finished republishing, it should contain full posts from now on. then you won't ever have to look at my hideous designs again!

as for the jagged post borders, one of the advantages of the new design is that i can totally change the look and feel just by replacing the graphics. so if i get tired of the jagged edges in a couple months, i might swap 'em out for something different. then again, maybe i won't.